Fascinated by change, architectural historians of the modernist generation generally filled their studies with accounts of new developments and innovations. In her book, Sally A. Kitt Chappell focuses instead on the subtler but more pervasive change that took place in the mainstream of American architecture in the period. Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, one of the leading American firms of the turn of the century, transformed traditional canons and made creative adaptations of standard forms to solve some of the largest architectural problems of their times—in railroad stations, civic monuments, banks, offices, and department stores. Chappell's study shows how this firm exemplified the changing urban hierarchy of the American city in the early twentieth century. Their work emerges here as both an index and a reflection of the changing urban values of the twentieth century.

Interpreting buildings as cultural artifacts as well as architectural monuments, Chappell illuminates broader aspects of American history, such as the role of public-private collaboration in city making, the image of women reflected in the specially created feminine world of the department store, the emergence of the idea of an urban group in the heyday of soaringly individual skyscrapers, and the new importance of electricity in the social order. It is Chappell's contention that what people cherish and preserve says more about them than what they discard in favor of the new. Working from this premise, she considers the values conserved by architects under the pressures of ever changing demands. Her work enlarges the scope of inquiry to include ordinary buildings as well as major monuments, thus offering a view of American architecture of the period at once more intimate and more substantial than any seen until now.
Richly illustrated with photographs and plans, this volume also includes handsome details of such first-rate works as the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, the Cleveland Terminal Group, and the Wrigley Building in Chicago.

At the turn of the last millennium, a powerful Native American civilization emerged and flourished in the American Midwest. By A.D. 1050 the population of its capital city, Cahokia, was larger than that of London. Without the use of the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, its technology was of the Stone Age, yet its culture fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture. The model for this urbane world was nothing less than the cosmos itself. The climax of their ritual center was a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acre rising a hundred feet into the sky—the tallest structure in the United States until 1867. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of this six-square-mile area in the central Mississippi Valley from the Big Bang to the present.

Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages?

To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present.
Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.